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Having personally used Multiple Data Mining techniques for several years now - It's not that Data Mining doesn't work, rather it's how its used. Data Mining is great at trend forecasting and if you're really good at what you're doing in it you can factor in probabilities of certain future events. The one key factor in data mining is a "Training Set" of Data to teach the machine(s) how to recognize the patterns. Since I suspect Terrorist come from every walk of life, every know nationality, and are using 1 off events this is throwing them a few headaches. The real key is to of course define what is normal, but if the rest of the world is as normal as are we here in the US they don't have a chance to pin point the Target Data (in this case people).

I would also suspect that the Terrorist Motives might be a key factor, but it's like pulling teeth to get any US Administration to admit that their foreign policy is screw up beyond belief, let alone something like a cruddy foreign policy might just result in cruddy foreign relations or popular uprisings around the world. If they did, then we wouldn't need data mining in the first place.

"May You - Live Long and Prosper in Interesting Times" -- by deweycheetham

deweycheetham (1124655) writes "... John Kanzius happened upon the discovery accidentally when he tried to desalinate seawater with a radio-frequency generator he developed to treat cancer. He discovered that as long as the salt water was exposed to the radio frequencies, it would burn....

also of note:...Roy will meet this week with officials from the Department of Energy and the Department of Defense to try to obtain research funding.

The scientists want to find out whether the energy output from the burning hydrogen — which reached a heat of more than 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit — would be enough to power a car or other heavy machinery....

deweycheetham (1124655) writes "MENLO PARK, California (Reuters) — A well-known hacker claims to have overcome restrictions on Apple Inc.'s iPhone, allowing highly technical users to bypass AT&T Inc.'s network to use the phone's Internet and music features.
In a post dated July 3 on his blog, Jon Johansen, 23, a prolific hacker of consumer electronics gadgets since he was a teenager in Norway, said "I've found a way to activate a brand new unactivated iPhone" without signing up for AT&T service.
"The iPhone does not have phone capability, but the iPod and Wi-Fi work. Stay tuned!" he wrote on his long-running blog, which is combatively named "So Sue Me." The post was entitled "iPhone Independence Day," a play on the July 4 U.S. holiday."Link to Original Source